That The Brilliant & Forever, the new novel by the author of A Method Actor’s Guide to Jekyll and Hyde and Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides, is laugh-out-loud funny doesn’t mean it isn’t, in essence, a tragedy. The unnamed narrator is an aspiring writer and expert in “haiku-kery”, a form of cuisine that must abide by strict rules of three meals of five ingredients, seven ingredients, then five ingredients. His best friends are Macy Starfield, an aspiring writer and pioneering “fishermanwoman”, and Archie, an aspiring writer and spittoon-carrying alpaca – and all three intend to compete in their island home’s annual literary festival, the eponymous “Brilliant and Forever”. The island is fiercely divided – between tourists and residents, the middle-class whitehousers and the traditional blackhousers, alpacas and humans, and northern alpacas and southern alpacas. Anyone who knows anything about Scottish culture will be aware that this greatly underestimates the number of divisions we Scots can conjure. But they are united in their love of, pride in and anxiety regarding their literary festival, despite the Judge’s Decision being notoriously corrupt and the People’s Decision being – well, that would be telling. I have been to a great many Scottish literary festivals, and some of the satirical swipes are palpable hits. I worried when I came across a character called Summer Kelly, but I doubt that the 22-year-old female writer, “radiant in beer and acceptance”, is my fictional alter ego.

From the title of the opening chapter, “If On a Summer’s Night an Alpaca”, the reader will realise that this charming, sad novel is inspired by Italo Calvino. After sketching out the leading trio’s slightly helter-skelter lives – including being mistaken for Death, the twinning of their island’s only major hill with Mount Fuji and an interest in alpaca rights – the bulk of the novel comprises the readings given at the aforesaid literary festival. Other contributors include a depressive waiter, an American psychopath, a local supermodel and a man born with a film projector in his head. It is a showcase for MacNeil’s virtuosity that also forces the reader to make quite stark choices: how seriously are we to take any given story? Is Macy’s “Homer and the Cèilidh” genuinely good, or are we just assenting to her friends’ generosity? Is the self-regarding Tabitha Tessington’s offering, “This Is a Castle, This Is a Kite”, saccharine whimsy or something of merit that the friends are too obtuse and prejudiced to perceive? This is a book that keeps the reader on hot coals, and my, but we caper the better for it.

Readers familiar with MacNeil’s other work will recognise much here – Buddhism, cycling, the problems of alcohol abuse and self-loathing, and, above all, cultural cringe (“Our culture is always desperate to be associated with others, even by tenuous, self-imposed or non-existent links, all stemming from an inane cultural insecurity. The end result is that we always assume our endeavours – and we ourselves – must be second rate and unoriginal, even if they and we are not. It’s part of the reason I am the way I am. Still, most of life is imaginary”). But the themes are delivered with more deadpan irony, and more panache here. There is a levity that harks back to Compton Mackenzie’s jeux d’esprit (perhaps more The Rival Monster or The Lunatic Republic than Whisky Galore) and Iain Crichton Smith’s hilarious Murdo stories. Yet the brightness and lightness offset the novel’s awful denouement. It is a climax that one should expect. Tragedy, after all, means literally “goat-song” and derives from ritual sacrifice.

The pronouncements of the narrator’s mysterious mentor after the festival is over may strike some as twee, or possibly Yoda-esque; but there is a persistent poetry even in these sections. Archie’s understanding that “everything earthy was first of all unearthly” resonates especially with the novel’s final, beautiful and ephemeral disappearance into its own blank page and the narrator’s amazement “to be alive in this mad, unreal universe”. Given so many so-called comedies from Scotland tend to revel in gross-out grotesquery, it is a joy to read such an engaging, luminous novel, which dissects rather than enacts our cultural cringe.